Carolien Kroeze: New WU career system brings a culture shift

In 2020, the Recognition & Reward Committee started to formulate a new performance review system. Why did the preliminary programme take so long?

Kroeze: This requires an enormous amount of thought. What guiding principles do you use? How do you want to carry out performance reviews? It starts by putting out feelers within the organisation and picking up any information you can get. Surveys, research studies, dialogues, ‘Let's Explore’ sessions: they all help to gain insight into the direction we want to take. Next, you want to test this further. It took so long precisely because we wanted a bottom-up process and we tried to involve everyone.

Who will be affected by the Academic Career Framework?

Kroeze: The framework regulates the career paths of assistant and associate professors, researchers, lecturers and professors holding a personal chair. Basically, anyone with an academic position within the University.

How will things change for these groups?

Kroeze: The new career path is more personal, flexible, and inclusive. It applies to everyone. And it facilitates mobility. It makes it possible, for example, to choose your own path, within your team, as part of your personal development. For example, if you currently teach but you are actually better suited to do research, a different path might suit you better. That flexibility is a central part of the new system.

What pathways are available?

Kroeze: There are pathways for lecturers, professors and researchers, who are assessed on the basis of four pillars: research, teaching, societal impact, and academic services. Each of these pillars applies to the three pathways, but in different proportions. Leadership plays a crucial role, more so than before. We are asking for a different kind of leadership, one that focuses less on the individual and more on the team.

The path ‘upwards’ also becomes more flexible. In the old system, there were four steps and unless something went seriously wrong, you could become a professor within 12 years. These time frames no longer apply. You can set your own pace. If you say you want to do it in 10 years, and you can make it work with your manager within that period, you can do it. But you can also take longer if that suits your situation better.

Tenure Track has been criticised for relying too much on quantity: the number of publications and the number of PhD candidates that researchers manage to attract. What about the ACF assessment criteria?

Kroeze: There are 18 ACF Evaluation Indicators. At different stages in your career, you will be asked to show where you stand and how you can, or cannot, take a step further, based on the profile you have put together in consultation with your manager. So it could be a performance review for a promotion, but it could also be an advice. In the new system, you have a say in that. That is completely different from the current Tenure Track system.

In the new system, there is room to say “Well, I'm at this level now, and I would like to stay here for a while.” If it fits within your team, this is possible. That is part of the culture change. I think our Tenure Track system has brought us many good things, but it is somewhat rigid and very quantitative.

Is the new system less focused on quantity?

Kroeze: It still has quantitative criteria in terms of publications and PhDs, but different from the current situation. The set of what constitutes scientific output is wider. People who make scientific impact in other ways than through publishing and PhD graduations will be valued more. There will be more attention for qualitative performance reviews.

How do you avoid the risk of subjectivity when assessing quality?

Kroeze: We need to invest a lot in that. We will make sure that there are always good peers, enough expertise within the committee. We will be devoting more attention to this than we do now. The Tenure Track system has a degree of objectivity that is seen as synonymous with fair. It means that you cannot favour your friends, because a publication is just a publication. We really need to make sure performance reviews remain fair.

So the system becomes broader and more flexible. Will academic employees soon be able to choose what criteria they are required to comply with?

Of those 18 indicators, some are mandatory and some free, depending on where you are on the spectrum. So you can indeed cherry pick, and I personally see this as an advantage. You are giving individuals the room to say “Besides the mandatory components for leadership and vision and mission, I also want space to make an impact in society.” That is why I think it makes people happier, because it empowers everyone. And it all has to fit in the team. That is the culture shift.

The culture change is about individual academics who see a different career path ahead and who are going to be recognised and rewarded differently. It is also about managers being given a different role in putting teams together in such a way that all those individuals fit in there and that they all contribute. We also ask those individuals very explicitly to reflect on their leadership skills, to show where they fit in the team. Developing leadership is central to the ACF: from leading yourself to leading another person, a team, or an organisation. And it is not just about your own team, because it goes beyond that. If you are in a Chair Group, it's about your role within that Chair Group, but also within your Science Group, and within your international networks.

The exciting thing about it is that we ask committees to assess this for an individual. We therefore also ask individuals to write down in detail where they stand in their leadership development and in the team.

Isn't this all going to take a lot more time and work?

Kroeze: The investment we need to make is in the culture change: training the committees and involving our leaders. This will require time and money. But we calculated that the new system by itself will probably take less time than the current Tenure Track. The time people put into their portfolios and the time committees spend issuing advice is ultimately less than in the current Tenure Track. The gain lies mainly in the fact that the evaluations no longer take place every three, but every five years. In addition to the Tenure Track system, we currently have ECP, the Education Career Path. So there are already two major tracks with lots of Appointment Advisory Committees (BAC). The frequency of those evaluations will decrease and the committees will partly shrink. The net effect is that, if you add up all the hours, the new system requires at most the same, but probably fewer hours.

What will the system look like in the coming period?

Kroeze: There will be a steering committee and three task forces that accompany the launch of the system at three levels. One task force will focus on portfolios. People who are assessed on the basis of the Academic Career Framework need to be clear about what needs to be included in their portfolio. The second task force will focus on chair holders, who will be playing an important role. This task force will be focusing on what the change will mean for them. The third level is the advisory committees (new Appointment Advisory Committees). Committee members will be trained to evaluate based on qualitative criteria and diversity among academics. Once the system is launched (in 2025), we will enter a transition period of probably a few years. People who are already in an existing track, Tenure Track or ECP, will be given the opportunity, for a certain period of time, to choose for the existing or the new system.